Hey it’s been a while since I posted something here. Figured I’d post something useful!

I like Garry’s Mod. I also enjoy running it as a dedicated server rather than as local server to take some relief of processing off my computer. But recently, Valve has created SteamPipe, changing how content gets downloaded. After much searching for information about how to get this all to work, I figured I’d post what I found out here so others can find it hopefully.

This past weekend I visited a friend up in New York. Before we went to his place, he convinced me to finally have some alcoholic drinks, though I wasn’t terribly happy that he did so, considering I was saying I’ve not drank before and didn’t ever plan to. He still managed to convince me to try something very small. So he grabbed 2 bottles of wine (one red, one a zinfandel) and also bought some Mike’s Hard Lemonaid.

We got back to his place and I tried the red wine first. The taste was a bit strong and bitter to me. It had 3 distinct tastes (that I can’t describe easily), but one of which was the alcohol itself. While I am aware there’s seemingly 1 million types of red wines and ages and whatnot, the red wine just didn’t really please me.

I then tried the zinfandel. This was cheaper than the red wine but surprisingly a little less strong to me. But again, I could not get past the alcohol in the drink. The alcohol is not a pleasing taste. I might be wrong, but I don’t believe most people like the taste of the alcohol in itself.

Finally later I tried the Mike’s Hard Lemonade. This is something I myself have said “if I ever try an alcoholic drink, it would be something like this, due to its low alcohol content and flavor I could already be familiar with”. So I gave it a go. I tried both limeade and lemonaide flavors. Both of these were fairly decent. But once again, that alcohol flavor came back to haunt me.

I never want to drink to get drunk. Ever. Never. It’s not my style. I don’t want to over do it for reasons I fear:

Potential alcoholism (doubt that would happen because I hate things that don’t taste good)

In the end, the taste wasn’t appealing and the reasons to drink other than taste aren’t appealing to me at all. I mildly regret drinking in the first place, but only because I had gone so long without drinking only to find out I wasn’t going to like it anyway.

Alright it’s been many many months since I made new fursuit DDR videos; almost a year infact (since July 13th). I stopped for a while because my pads broke on me.

But last month I got a new working pad. So now I bring you another edition of my Fursuit DDR videos… 80’s edition!

I just went to FCN 2010 so I’m still on a bit of an 80’s kick (especially since it seems like a lot of places are playing more and more 80’s these days). So I decided to reflect that in my videos with three songs from the 80’s* licensed for DDR

The pads held up very well this time. Well enough that I got my first AAA! Also for my 10th video I figured “why not” and played a 10 footer. Was hoping to do MAX300 but I ended up going with PARANOIA survivor instead. I still suck at 10 footers anyway :P Here’s the links

This has got to be my best con I’ve had ever. I’ve been to plenty and I was really really happy after the fact. From the minute we got there it felt like it was going to be good and it sure was. So here’s my extremely lengthy report from what I remember.Read the rest of this entry »

I just recorded and put up 4 new videos today for you folks. Mixed results but I’m overall happy with it. I also have the capturing and encoding down pretty well. Did another song I can stealth. I think I may try to record multiple songs each time with one of them being a stealth (until I don’t have any more songs I can stealth).

Back a bit before I actually started recording the videos in fursuit, I was testing stuff such as camera positioning and lighting and audio and whatnot. In the middle of doing so I AAAed Kind Lady which isn’t really too hard for me and not new for me either. The results screen never did come up though since the disc was not in great shape.

Either way, click the link if you care to watch. Then subscribe to my channel for more videos like it.

Good news is that I managed to get the equipment to hook up my VCR to my WinTV card! So I was able to properly encode the latest videos now. These videos, along with any future videos, include better and direct audio feed of the song AND video in the corner of the screen. I’m also glad the pad held up for the most part this time.

Tonight not long after I posted the video I decided to go and record some more videos. The setup was a lot quicker now that I knew where things went and the pad was cooperating for me this time! Managed to get 3 videos, one of which I think might be a first for fursuit DDR videos on youtube. Or atleast a rare sight.

The videos may take a little bit before I get them up, since I am looking to get a S-Video male to Composite female adapter to allow me to plugin my VCR into my WinTV card, since I use the VCR to record a better audio feed AND a clearer shot of the screen.

Tonight I’ve finally recorded my first fursuit DDR video! I’ll try and encode it in a bit and maybe even upload it tonight, but no promises on that. But if you want to watch when it’s published if you don’t look at my LJ or blog much, subscribe to my channel!

For my first video, it took me about 45 minutes of preparation to make sure I had the right positions and height and such, and to make sure equipment was still calibrated. Then it took me about 30-45 minutes to do recordings. Cause some things went wrong. The pad isn’t in great shape, my paws aren’t great so I decided to simply take them off. And trying another song, the pad just ended up being very bad. All in all, I only ended up with 1 song, but atleast now I know how to set it up quicker.

2 weeks and 100 downloads later, WP Cornify 0.2.0 is out. But what could this update possibly contain? More scripts!

WP Cornify no longer just supports Cornify. It also supports ninjafy!, Nipple It!, Sharkify and Hoffify. Not sure which one to use? Turn on random! You’ll get a different one each time you load the page.

I probably should have wrote this a few days ago, but it still seems to be changing more and more.

That coding job I did for the guy wasn’t actually giving me a run around for paying him. He actually did end up legitimately paying me a couple of days later.

The site migration/server project I did is now online. There’s 3 sub sites to do, which unfortunately COULD be a bitch since they have more customized themes, but they might end up being very simple. We’re not sure yet.

As for the job apps I did put in, well one place sounds like they already hired. However, one place is looking to interview sooner than expected since another person got a new job elsewhere. Also, 2 stores I looked at are hiring, and I found out an old school mate of mine is an assistant manager at a bank and has been looking to say hi to me.

Biggest news of all: Dad is okay! It sounds like his blood pressure medicine somehow reacted with him very awkwardly (maybe in conjunction with other medicine he took). They kept him overnight, but all tests turned up negative for stuff like blood clots. So no strokes, no additional blood clots. He’s still in pain from the 28″ incision, but still nothing more severe.

So I’ve got a lot of stress lately. I’ve got a project that I just completed whereby the client is apparently giving me the run around for trying to pay me. I also have some other work I want to do that isn’t going anywhere at the moment because the guy doesn’t seem to understand that I can’t do certain things for him YET until I get other equipment first and has yet to give me a list of other things to do.

I also have some small side work I am doing as a favor for some folks that is dealing with some code and server components that can be very frustrating, and it took me nearly a whole day just to get one feature of the site to work.

Also, since I moved I have yet to get a call about any applications I have put in and do not have my own funds to get around town to find said jobs easily. Everything within walking distance is pretty much mom and pop stores.

But the biggest issue just happened about 1 hour ago. My dad had vascular bypass surgery on Tuesday on his leg. A nice long cut along his leg to. He decided to smoke. After about 4 puffs my mom was trying to speak to him and all he could do was mumble for about 2 minutes.

So now he’s back IN the hospital and just arrived minutes ago. I have too much stuff going on and too much stress to want to be in the hospital, so I need to get out of this house for now.

I have no clue why I’m up so late right now considering it’s Mother’s Day and we’re doing an early dinner tomorrow.

Anyway, I finally spent about 1/2 an hour or so and typed up basically a small summary of my life about some of the more geeky things I enjoy and why and how things lead down that path. Might be an interesting read even for those of you that think you know me well! Check it out in the “About Me” section here on my site.

Oh and an update about wp-cornify. So far 37 people downloaded my plugin. 37? In a row? Err I mean 37? I didn’t expect that many so far. It’s not even been 5 days and 37 other people wanted unicorns and rainbows on their site when they put in the konami code. Weird huh?

Figured it wouldn’t take long. WP Cornify is now available on the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. So now you can actually search for “cornify” in your plugins section and find my plugin and install it. Cause you totally know you want to.

So I randomly decided to Cornify my page. You can check it out by putting in the “Konami code”. If you don’t know what that is, ask your local video game geek. I made this a WordPress plugin, so if anybody cares to put this on their WordPress site, feel free to! Just goto the WP Cornify section of my site.

What am I getting myself into! I’ve been thinking of possibly recording videos of me playing DDR and other fursuit-friendly music games (drummania and Pop’n Music come to mind) and posting them to YouTube. I’ll probably make some list of songs available based on the mixes I have and whether I’ve done them or not. I’ll also let people vote on songs they want to see done or re-done if they think I can get a better score on it.

Wow. This right after I post the link for the cheap G1s. But I still support them…

I glanced the trending topics on Twitter the other day and saw the #amazonfail tag. After reading many of the Twitter posts, there was obviously something not quite right on Amazon.com: Books disappeared. You couldn’t easily find them. Why the big stink? Because many of these books were either written by a homosexual author or were LBGT-oriented.

That’s definitely got a disturbing ring to it. I still have yet to understand a full non-religious specific reasoning behind anti-gay movements. It’s different, sure. But to hate? Come on guys. But back to the topic at hand.

Right away I was skeptical. I was not convinced a large company would do something like this and figure they’d get away with it. Nor would they have an intention. To think that such a large well known company would even consider such an action doesn’t make sense at all. They know better than to think people are going to assume they have no such books, or that they suddenly, without warning removed these books. Even if they did think others would notice, they know that there would be a loud outcry by the community that would hurt their image.

So why does everybody seem to want to bring out pitchforks and torches so easily? This post lays it out pretty clearly in my opinion: “Moral judgment is harder to reverse than other, less emotional forms; when an event precipitates the cleansing anger of righteousness, admitting you were mistaken feels dirty.”

I think that more people need to take the time to remember there’s always two sides to a story. Even when you are angry at somebody, some corporation, or something, think of the possibilities as to why this decision was made. Take everything into account.

I leave you with a link of irony. The sale of AmazonFail.com on eBay. The picture used is that of Amazon.com’s web servers less gracefully announcing a technical difficulty and that the site is unavailable. The added caption: “404 – FAIL!”. The irony of this picture being that 404 is an HTTP status code which means “Object Not Found”. 404 is, unfortunately, a heavily overused term to mean you cannot view a page in general. “Service Unavailable” is actually status 503. So I call this “‘404 – FAIL!’ FAIL!”

Apparently Amazon is selling the T-Mobile G1 for under $100 after a contract. I didn’t look at the details of this but it seems to be done directly by Amazon, which to me means less of a chance of being screwed over. They’re available in blackwhite or bronze, though the black one is $0.22 more for whatever reason.